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03 05
Distributing The Future: Designing Sustainable Cities
 (This story was first published in the New York Institute of Urban Design Newsletter. It is an overview of the United Nation's "Sustainable Cities" Conference held in October of 2006. CKF's Editor, Robert Ouellette, was a respondent at that event.) William Gibson’s phrase, "The future is here, it is just not evenly distributed," is a worthy introduction to the "Sustainable Cities: Urban Design,” conference held recently at the United Nations in New York. Audience members discovered that the future is here - at least in terms of sustainable development - and Architects, Landscape Architects, Urban Designers, and even Politicians are creating it. The task ahead is to distribute that future and make the systemic changes needed to preserve the environment. What are designers doing to create sustainable cities in a market the Economist calls the greatest wealth-generating activity the 21st Century will offer? Some, like Mario Schjetnan, of Mexico, are re-imagining the role parks play in a livable city. Anyone who has traveled to Mexico City knows that it faces population and pollution problems U.S. cities hope never to encounter. Officially, it is home to 20,000,000 people. Unofficial counts add as many as 10,000,000 to that number. In spite of near overwhelming challenges – Schjetnan says that the worlds of Cortez and Montezuma constantly clash here – his parks provide a retreat from the city’s chaos. From a sustainability perspective, the parks are also waste-processing systems that cleanse local water and air. Imagine a modern version of Olmstead's Central Park. Now combine it with integrated water purification systems and you have an idea of how important Schjetnan's designs are. They improve the quality of life for the inhabitants of Mexico City. Dr. Suha Ozkan, past Secretary General of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture, has spent much of his career exploring how tradition can inform architectural innovation. To Dr. Ozkan, today’s sustainable development techniques echo architectural practices of the past. He sites Saudi Arabia's "Tuwaiq Palace," as an example. There, in a hot and arid environment, traditional forms improve the energy efficiency of a complex, modern building. Sustainability is not only for big budget projects though. The Aga Khan Award has also gone to relatively simple designs that save lives in the world’s poorer communities. Examples of that work include Nadar Khalili’s “Sandbag Shelters.” Khalili designs emergency habitations that do not require costly materials to build. Instead, they use simple cotton bags filled with sand. The sandbags are the basic building modules for traditional single and double curved walls held in place by wire mesh. The resulting shelters resist hurricane force winds, earthquakes, and floods. Simple. Cheap. Effective. Professors Tomonori Matsu and Junichrio Okata of Tokyo University showed what Tokyo, the world’s biggest urban aggregation at some 35,000,000 inhabitants, is doing to reduce the city’s environmental impact. Appropriating sports arena roofs to capture rainwater is one effort and redesigning typical Tokyo neighbourhoods so they are more sustainable is another. One fact about the country they shared had a profound effect on the assembled audience: Japan has retained about 67% of its original forest coverage for the past 200 years. Take a moment to comprehend this. Two centuries ago, the Japanese decided to preserve their forests as a legacy for future generations. Since then, the percentage of the land’s original forests has remained constant. How many other nations can make that claim? Closer to home, Mayor Christopher Coleman of St. Paul, Minnesota, is leading an initiative to green that city. He described something that I call the St. Paul paradox: Making that city more urban has also made it more natural. For (...read more...)
02 27
Semi-live Blogging From The Toronto City Summit Day 2: Afternoon, Strong Neighbourhoods
One last workshop this afternoon… This time it is “Building Strong Neighbourhoods.” The questions are as follows: One, How can we achieve long-term funding and commitment from all orders of government for a problem that is complex and that may take years to turn around? What is the role of non-profits and the private sector? Two, How can we achieve transformational change in declining neighbourhoods that will outlast short-term and one-time funding? Three, How do we build awarenes and commitment without further stigmatizing affected neighbourhoods? Paul Brogan is the guest speaker for this session. He is from Boston, ex of Harvard where he taught in the business school, and is author of books on the revitalization of the city. He mentions that hypercapitalism is changing the authority of the city because power flows not locally but internationally. The problems cities face today are much smaller than the problems U.S. cities faced in the mid 70s. But, they were solved. Investment in cities changed what some predicted would be empty wastelands. The problems facing Toronto’s neighbourhoods can be halted but the most important is the concentration of poverty in certain neighbourhoods. They need strong local representation. One method is through Community Development Corporations. They keep capital in even the poorest of neighbourhoods. Michael Porter of Harvard has published on the phenomenon.
Semi-live Blogging From The Toronto City Summit Day 2: Morning Session
Louise Comeau is giving the morning workshop keynote. Comeau is Director of the Sage Climate Project. The question we ask is “Should Toronto become “The Greenest big city in North America”? In her preamble, Comeau is equating the environmental threat to that of a global nuclear war. It is the world’s greatest policy issue. back in the 1980s, the City of Toronto made a tentative commitment to reduce greenhouse gasses by 20%. Of course, those targets were forgotten. Kyoto offered new targets but they too have failed to curb the escalation of greenhouse gas generation. The U.K. Stern Report states the economic impact global warming will have. There is no longer a doubt that this is a real phenomenon. We must take every step we can to get to our Kyoto targets. Toronto, as Canada’s leading city, must have a target to be the continent’s leading green city by 2015. City decision-making has to form itself to make these objectives possible. We have to fast-track, says Comeau, the approval of green building construction as buildings are the key to our reaching those goals. The assembled group here is asked to tackle the following questions:
02 26
Semi-live Blogging From The Toronto City Summit Day 1: Afternoon
Mayor Miller is in a press scrum and there are so many video cameras in such a tight space no one else can see. I’ve escaped to the waterfront session that includes Matt Blackett of Spacing as well as John Campbell, CEO of TWRC, Bruce Kuwabara of KPMB Architects, Bill Boyle, CEO of Harbourfront Centre, and Ken Greenberg Urban Designer.
John Campbell starts off with his talk… says that after two centuries of delays the next year will bring many changes to the waterfront. Still, what is most important is attracting employers to the district. Matt Blackett is now speaking—he is saying that to his knowledge people in the city don’t carer about plans, they want to see shovels in the ground. We have to attract today’s ten year olds because by the time the overall project is done they will be 40 years old. Bill Boyle says that the Harbourfront Centre get 12.5 million visitors per year. Operate on 75% private sector investment. Public, according to Boyle, wants authenticity—it tells our stories. They want ownership of the waterfront. They want a variety of attractions. Keep content changing. Mostly, they want the waterfront to have passion and soul. Boyle puts up a challenge: He wants to have the world’s largest design exhibition to take place on fifty acres. ke Greenberg, “The retreat of the industrial glacier,” is what he describes the phenomenon behind the evolving waterfront. This is where city’s are redefining themselves. It is a huge undertaking that goes on over decades. Landscape architecture is the first step in rebuilding the waterfront. He has three suggestions for going forward: One, is kick off train ing wheel, Two, is the small leads to the big, and three is connecting the dots. ken worries that there are too many teams in the field. He thinks it is time to change that because an enormous amount of energy is wasted. Bringing together issues of design elements is critical.
Semi-live Blogging From The Toronto City Summit
I’m at the Toronto City Summit (2007) today absorbing the big policy issues that will influence the city over the next decades. The intro this morning was from David Pecault of the Boston Consulting Group. The morning’s keynote was from Ric Young of E-Y-E. Young is a remarkable person who long ago embraced the power complexity theory has to effect social change. More about Young’s talk later. Update: I’m at the discussion about Toronto’s Cultural Renaissance. Speakers are Sara Diamond of OCAD, Meric Gertier, Vice-Dean, U of Toronto, Catherine Hernandez, Writer, and Tim Jones, CEO, Toronto Artscape. Meric Gertier says that Toronto is a leader in the “Creative City” movement. Great work going on in the city with Marg Zeidler, for example. Recent OMB decisions around Active 18 illustrates that there is work to be done. Tim Jones is speaking about “Culture led regeneration” versus gentrification. Artscape has worked with some of the great thinkers on city building. We have to get serious about building communities for artists and for creative enterprises. We need policies that track the effectiveness of creative city initiatives. Art Scape is part of an arts collective that just has received funding for implementing the plan. Jones thinks we can stand out internationally in our creative endeavours. If we don’t, however, we will decline. Sara Diamond is now speaking about the culture of innovation. Her theme is how we need to nurture design innovation. We need to be able to navigate complexity. Other nations are implementing design strategies—we are not. Some areas research could address in our city are energy efficiency, hospital design, systems to support aging populations, making the transit system more engaged . . . She argues that we need to put money into workshops - charrettes—does she know about the DesignCamps? The cultural sector can help solve some of the major problems facing or city. They are breaking for table-based workshops.
02 19
Using Online Collaborative Design To Solve Environmental Problems
02 05
Toronto’s Waterfront Goes Green
Torontonians are waking up from a century long nightmare where our city willfully industrialized then polluted a waterfront that could rival the Riviera’s. Toronto’s dark sleep is over though. We are once again embracing the lake, this time with a green renaissance that will make Toronto a global leader in sustainable waterfront development. New parks will soon edge the lakefront from Etobicoke to Scarborough. The shear size of this waterfront rediscovery is difficult to imagine. After all, isn’t the waterfront where Toronto puts highways, rail yards, and smokestack industries? Not any more—except for the Ontario Liberal government’s counter-intuitive placement of a gas-fired power plant in the eastern port lands. But that is an exception that proves the rule. Look at the newly proposed Lake Ontario Park for the latest example of our waterfront reawakening. Extending from the Harris Water Filtration Plant in the east to the end of the Leslie Street Spit in the west, the 925 acre park will boast 37 kilometers of shoreline. It also will create new marinas and give all Torontonians the lake access now only enjoyed by a few in the ever more costly Beach district. The park’s plan ties together three major city districts: The Beach, the Spit, and the Cherry Street industrial lands. In many ways, the master planners, Field Operations of New York, are referring back to the landscape of an earlier Toronto waterfront where sand eroded from the eastern bluffs formed the now lost Fisherman’s Island that once enclosed Ashbridge’s Bay. The Beach segment is primarily recreational and cultural while the Spit will become more of a nature wilderness. In between is Cherry Beach—referred to as the “Bar” as in sand bar—that will offer a mixture of recreational and natural amenities including an expanded marina. A unified park this vast is intended to be an international landmark on par with New York’s Central Park or, in a Canadian context, Vancouver’s Stanley Park. The agency responsible for bringing these plans to life—the Toronto Waterfront Revitalization Corporation—thinks big. John Campbell, TWRC’s President and CEO, says that in the future when people think of Toronto they will first think of Lake Ontario Park. “Cities are defined by the quality of their public spaces,” argues Campbell. It will be expensive too. When finished, the entire east to west waterfront revitalization project will represent an investment of about 4 billion dollars in public money and 17 to 20 billion in combined public and private funding. According to Campbell it may just be the largest such project in the world. Whether you are an Italian Medici or a Canadian TWRC, the capital required for any renaissance attracts the best artists and designers. Don Schmidt of Diamond and Schmidt Architects notes, “The project is absolutely thrilling. What is really remarkable is that right now we have three or four of the world’s top landscape architects in the city working on these projects.” It is money well spent. We know from City Hall’s Creative City research that this kind of investment is a critical part of Toronto’s 21st century economic strategy. Offering knowledge workers a livable city will be essential to our future global economic competitiveness. We will also need enjoyable leisure spaces to decompress from the increasing urban density that is part of Toronto’s future. Ted Tyndorf, Toronto’s chief planner, says that by 2031 Toronto’s population will grow by 540,000 from its 1996 census figures. 2031 seems far off but what is interesting, according to Tyndorf, is that when our condo building boom is soon done we (...read more...) |
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